Brideshead Revisited

An adaptation that sacrifices so little of the original book cannot be said to be anything other than noble. Some other thoughts: • Irons is clearly too old to be cast as a student, although the casting comes into its own as Ryder ages into his thirties and forties; the same cannot be said for the Cordelia actress, who ages as if by magic from 14 to 40. • The whole series probably is too long, really. The fact that it takes around 15 minutes to flash back to the '20s is emblematic of this. I wonder how much of this stems from the flaws of the source material - more specifically, I wonder how well the transfer of Ryder's affection from one Flyte to another really works. • It's really interesting to see the impact of this series on 80's popular culture, and, again, the degree to which a setting so far removed from that of its viewers captivated them (see also: Four Weddings). Does a neoliberal Thatcherite movement move Britons to adore something so conservative, or do conservative impulses drive both a love of this and Thatcherism? There again, this series accompanied the death knell of the British aristocracy. Perhaps it marked the passing of the torch from one mark of conservatism to another. • Anthony Blanche is undoubtedly the highlight of the series, far more than in the book. The sequence in which he pretentiously recites verse from a Hertford terrace to the joy of those below him is surely hard to match - anywhere (a pity that I cannot find it on YouTube). • The final five minutes - stunning. Transcendent.